The Alone
by DaLizzie
Summary: A boy sits in the hospital alone, with a radio and a single window as his only escape. What can ease the pain of being trapped in an earthly hell? Shounen-ai, don't like it don't read it. Disclaimer: Yu-Gi-Oh ain't mine


A/N: And now, for part 2 of my resurrection! Yes, folks, she's going to attempt to start two stories at once! drum roll with kazoo accompaniment And there's a lot more where that came from! So, long story short: I finally came back to and read a few fics by Silverlily aka Blood Moon, and the inspiration that I have been putting off for so long bit me in the ass and forced me at spork-point to get this raw stuff edited and ready-to-go. So, here goes!

P.S. Beware: This fic is not a feel-good fic. Don't read it if you are depressed. Go read Behind the Scenes by Silverlily if you are depressed, not my tear-jerker junk.

The Alone

Chapter 1

The man in the expensive business suit was still pacing back and forth. He had been for the past forty-five minutes. The man came back across the room again, and Katsuya glanced at the clock. Forty-six minutes. Time was passing slowly, as it seemed to do sometimes, and in typical fashion, the minutes decided to tick away slower for a particularly dreadful, rainy night.

Forty-seven minutes. A nurse came out of entrance to the emergency room and walked over to the man in the suit. She said something to him that seemed to make him very excited, and then she led him back through the swinging doors.

One hour and forty-seven minutes ago, Katsuya had been at work taking orders, refilling glasses, mopping kitchen floors, and watching the clock wishing that the black hands would move closer to the end of his shift. Of course, one hour and forty-seven minutes ago, time had been moving at its regular speed. Time didn't slow down for simple things like the end of a work shift. It only slowed down for the really big happenings, like volcanoes erupting, a building collapsing… or a car crash.

Forty-eight minutes. A little boy in the seat across from him was pulling on his mother's sleeve, complaining that his stomach still hurt. As time slowed even more, the boy's voice became muted and far away. Katsuya stared down at his numb hands lying in his lap, wishing again for the night to be just a little closer to ending. The first night, the first few hours, that's always the time when one either feels everything or one feels nothing. Katsuya felt nothing. No matter how much he wanted it to be different, he felt nothing.

Forty-nine minutes. Let this night be over, he thought. Let me feel. He knew he had some reasons to feel something besides sadness, but still… it was his father. One hour and nine minutes ago, his father was alive. One hour and eight minutes ago, his father wasn't. And Katsuya felt nothing as the rain fell down outside the glass hospital doors.

Time took a sudden jump forward into its regular rhythm as Katsuya realized that there was a pair of eyes staring at him. How long the eyes and the person they belonged to had been there, Katsuya didn't know. They were big, bright, purple eyes, gazing at him unblinkingly with a curious expression.

"Hello," a boy's voice said, and it took a moment for Katsuya to process that it was the person in front of him who had spoken. He blinked, then replied, "Hi."

The boy stared at him for a few more moments, then plopped down in the seat to Katsuya's left. Jagged blond bangs bounced around his features with every movement, and spikes of black tipped with ruby red adorned his head like a crown. He was nearly a head shorter than Katsuya, not counting the hair, and the blond boy figured he couldn't be any more than fifteen years old. The boy was dressed in light blue pajamas with little yellow stars all over them, his bare feet swinging back and forth over the edge of the seat.

Still keeping his eyes locked on Katsuya, the boy asked, "Why are you sad?" Honey-colored eyes blinked, then looked away from the violet stare. Leaning back in his seat, Katsuya sighed heavily. The dozens of sarcastic, insulting, and otherwise rude answers that would have usually entered his head at such a simple yet personal question didn't come, and he was silent for a few moments. It did cross his mind that he could just not say anything at all, but not wanting time to go back to it's astronomically small rate of passage, he answered, "Because my father's dead, and I don't know where my mother and sister are." There was no reply from the boy next to him, so Katsuya went on in a grave, quiet voice, "So, I'm alone."

At first, Katsuya didn't quite believe what his ears told him that he had heard. But no, there it was again; the boy was laughing. The blond turned his head slowly to stare at the boy incredulously, and the boy just stared back with a smile on his face. "Of course you're alone. Everyone is alone at the end of each day. It's only the memories that you have at the end of the day that make you think otherwise."

Katsuya was at a complete loss for words for several moments, and before he could even think coherently again, a rather stout nurse with a ruddy face traipsed into the waiting room, her eyes scanning the seats. When she sighted Katsuya and the violet-eyed boy, she marched over to them. The boy didn't seem to notice her approach until she took him by the arm and pulled him to his feet.

"Now, then, Mr. Mutou, you know what I've said and I'll say it again. You're not supposed to be up wandering around the hospital at any time of the day, and especially not this late. Back upstairs with you, now."

The boy followed the nurse out of the waiting room, turning his head to take a last look at Katsuya, who was still sitting in his seat speechless. The boy disappeared around the corner. Slowly, the blond boy looked up at the clock. Fifty-six minutes.

Standing up, Katsuya glanced first towards the exit, then to where he had last seen the boy. He suddenly found himself rather curious, wondering why that boy was in the hospital and why he had been up wandering around. Without really making a decision, Katsuya went over to the front desk. After waiting for a young woman with two small children in her arms to sign some papers, Katsuya asked the nurse at the desk, "What room is, uh… Mr. Motou in?"

"Yugi Motou?" the woman asked, not looking up from the files she was going through. "Yeah," Katsuya said quickly, hoping that Yugi Motou and the boy he had just seen were the same person.

"Are you family?" she asked.

"No, just a close friend." Katsuya suddenly realized that they might not let him see the boy if he wasn't family, but it was too late to change his response now.

"You will find him in room 273," the nurse said, still not looking up. "Go down the hall to the right, take the elevator to the third floor, turn left out of the elevator, turn left again at the next hallway, and it's nine doors down on your right."

"Thank you."

He repeated the room number to himself under his breath as he pushed the up button next to the elevator door. After a few moments, the door opened, two doctors and a woman with a child in her arms exiting. Katsuya tried to ignore the rather tuneless elevator music as he tapped his foot impatiently, waiting for the elevator to reach its destination.

The door opened to an empty hallway, and for a moment, Katsuya forgot where he was supposed to go. Thankfully, his memory jumped back into gear, and he walked quickly down the hallway to the left. He swerved around the first left corner, keeping an eye on the door numbers to his right.

265… Not quite. Thunder crashed loudly outside, the storm still going strong. 270, 271, 272… Katsuya stopped in front of room 273, suddenly wondering if he should knock or if he should just go on in. Deciding that it would be rather rude to barge in, he rapped his knuckles tentatively on the door. There was no response for several moments. Katsuya almost turned to walk back down the hallway when there was a soft, "Yeah?" from behind the door. He jumped slightly, staring at the door handle as if it was the thing that had spoken.

Katsuya found himself opening the door, well-oiled hinges not making a sound. The room was dim, the only real light being the occasional flashes of lightning from the stormy sky. The relatively small room contained only a bed, two chairs, and a small desk of drawers standing next to the bed. Some of the floor had a jigsaw puzzle half put together, and several other puzzle boxes sitting next to it.

In the bed Katsuya could see the outline of the boy. The crown of hair on his head, even as a silhouette, was quite distinctive. The boy moved, a hand reaching out in the dark to turn on the lamp on top of the drawers. Katsuya blinked a few times in the new light, seeing the boy who had been downstairs just ten minutes earlier quite clearly.

"Yugi?" he asked in a more timid voice than he had intended. The boy blinked a few times at him, then smiled.

"You're the sad person from downstairs?" he asked softly. Katsuya blinked back, then nodded, assuming that he had been the only one that Yugi had talked to.

"Have you come to visit me?" he asked in a half-hopeful voice, somehow sounding much older than he looked, which wasn't very old in pajamas with little stars on them.

Katsuya just nodded again, and Yugi smiled, chuckling a bit. "Not a big talker, are you?"

Finding himself suddenly unable to think of a reply, Katsuya stayed silent. Yugi gestured at the chair next to the bed. "You can sit down, if you want to. It's rather refreshing to see someone here besides a nurse."

Katsuya stepped farther into the room, sitting down on the white folding chair next to Yugi's bed, which he noticed was also white. Why was everything in the entire hospital white?

"What's your name?" Yugi asked.

The blond paused for a moment. What was his name? "Um, Katsuya," he finally managed to say. There was an awkward silence for a few moments.

"Uh, what you said earlier, when we were downstairs…" Katsuya started, but Yugi cut him off with a dismissive wave of his hand.

"Oh, that. I scare plenty of people off that way. I'm sorry if I offended you by laughing, but it's just that I was listening to this thing on the radio just today, and there's a radio show that always has a quote of the day at the end of it. The quote was something about people always being alone at the end of the day except for their memories, and it was the first thing that popped into my head when you said that you were alone. I tend to be sort of scatterbrained like that. Something pops into my head, and it pops out of my mouth. I wasn't really laughing because your father was dead, honest…"

Suddenly, Yugi's demeanor became very shy, his pale cheeks coloring slightly as he looked down at his lap. Katsuya felt a little twinge in his shock-frozen heart at the boy's guilty expression.

"It's all right. I guess we all act a little strange sometimes, and I did kind of need something to bring me back to reality. I was losing myself there for a while."

A smile crept onto Yugi's face. "We lose ourselves all the time…" He looked up at Katsuya again. "I'm sorry about your father, by the way… I know what it's like. My dad died when I was seven, along with my mom."

"What happened?" Katsuya asked softly.

"Car accident," Yugi replied bluntly, looking out the window again. The blond looked over at a fixed spot on the floor, his vision suddenly going out of focus. "That's what happened to my dad…"

Yugi lay back on the bed pillows, his eyes turning to Katsuya. "What was your dad like?" he asked.

Katsuya froze for a moment at the question, shifted his weight in the chair, and bit his lip in thought. "Well… we didn't have the best of relationships. He was lazy a lot of the time, and was always getting fired from his jobs when I was younger. I've been working a lot these past few years for us to keep our apartment. He'd yell at me sometimes, forget things that I told him not to forget…." Katsuya paused, then continued, "He never hit me, though. I guess he cared about me enough to do some things right. He showed up at my junior high school graduation and stuff like that. He might've been sort of drunk, but he was there."

The blond shrugged, gradually finding it harder and harder to speak. "He'd let me down more often than he'd actually come through for me, but…" He paused again, his unfocused eyes becoming blurred with tears. "He was still my dad, y'know?"

That was it. The dam broke. Time thrust him forward like a rag doll on a roller coaster, and Katsuya was surprised that there wasn't some kind of small mushroom cloud to go along with it. The tears coursed down his cheeks with no signs of stopping, and he was shaking so hard that he had to hug himself tightly to keep his balance on the chair.

He barely noticed warm arms encircling him, slowly leading him to his knees on the floor where he collapsed and grabbed on to the fabric of someone's shirt. It took him several minutes to notice that the fabric was light blue with little yellow stars, and that the warm arms around him belonged to Yugi. The boy's violet eyes were also filled with tears, and he was kneeling on the floor in front of Katsuya with his arms around the blond.

"I don't want you to cry…" he said softly. "I don't like it when people cry…"

Katsuya couldn't even reply. The empty nothingness was gone, and suddenly everything hurt so much that he had trouble breathing. Time had fallen through the fabric of the world and landed in a dark, stinging river full of uncontrollable rapids.

The hurt was only temporary, though. After a period of time unknown to Katsuya, the sharp pain began to dissipate into the somewhat unfamiliar feeling of a good cry, and he could feel himself resurfacing from the deep river of memory that he had fallen into. The pain pent-up in the constricting shield of shock had rushed out of him, leaving him with a dull ache and an exhausted consciousness.

"That actually felt good…" the blond said, not quite fully aware that he was speaking out loud. "I haven't cried in a long time…"

"I read somewhere that crying releases endorphins that make you feel good. That might be why," Yugi said rather absently. Katsuya chuckled past a hiccup. "You're just full of information, aren't you?"

Yugi pulled away from Katsuya, looking him in the eye. His eyes were almost luminescent in the dimly lit room. "Are you okay now?" he asked gently. Katsuya nodded slowly, and pulled himself to his feet with Yugi's help. He flopped down into the chair. Yugi sat down on his bed, and neither of them said anything for a long while.

A question suddenly jumped into Katsuya's mind, and even though he wondered whether it would be a good idea to ask it or not, once it was in his head it refused to leave. "Say, Yugi?" he said tentatively.

"Hmm?"

"What are you in the hospital for?"

Yugi opened his mouth, then closed it rather suddenly, looking down at his hands. He sat there unmoving for several moments, barely even seeming to breathe. Katsuya was about to apologize for asking such a question when the door behind him opened rather suddenly and the stout nurse that had taken Yugi upstairs earlier marched in.

She immediately walked over to Yugi's be, gingerly pushing him down onto the pillows and pulling the covers over him. "You can't be up too late now, Mr. Mutou, you need to get plenty of rest."

It took her several moments to realize that there was another person in the room. She blinked a few times at the blond, then said, "Visiting hours were over thirty minutes ago, sir. I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

"Ah, okay, then." Katsuya stood up rather reluctantly, and was ushered towards the door. He turned around before he was all the way out the door to say, "Yugi? Is it okay if I come back tomorrow sometime?"

Yugi smiled at him from his place on the bed. "I would like that very much, Katsuya." The blond smiled back, and walked out the door and down the whitewashed hallway. His steps weren't what you would call springy, but it did seem as though a weight had fallen from his shoulders.


End file.
